FM bug using salvaged SMD parts

If you’re a soldering ninja this FM transmitter bug is for you. It’s quite similar to the one we looked at yesterday, but this uses 100% salvaged parts. Two phones donated components; a Nokia 3210 for its voltage-controlled oscillator and a Nokia 1611 for the rest of the parts. The bad news is that mobile technology like cellphones use some of the smallest surface mount packages known to man. That’s where the soldering skill come into play. The good news is that if you’ve been scavenging for discarded phones in order to reuse their LCD screens you already have these parts on hand.

If you are receivable at 1km with a TV card you are probably receivable considerably farther by a ham with a decent base antenna from 430-450Mhz or worse yet by Police/Fire/Military/etc which use the rest of that band.

Easy enough to modulate a mic and pump out visible or IR light next to the window. We used the plumbing in a tall building to pump a 56k data link from floor to floor (five floors away) without much trouble. Waste pipes and water supply were grounded, but not well enough.

The world has come a very long way.

It’s like Cellphones + Spectrum Analyzers.
The 21st century – it’s magic, complete with rainbows, and it’s all elementary magic at that.

This sounds interesting though I’m not sure this is the right way of using that VCO, it should contain some circuitry to regulate the voltage that drives the VCO frequency.
All searches for this part datasheets returned no useful results therefore I cannot tell what pin should be used for that purpose (pin 4 maybe).
If anyone has a datasheet or a working link please post it somewhere, thanks.

Another cool invention that people long before me invented – well, who cares.

In 1984, I thought that the wide-band burst bug was a unique invention. You record at low quality for days or weeks – when there’s actually something to hear – and then spit it out at huge data rates with time stamps – equivalent to wifi at 50Mbs – in a single burst, which is repeated later just in case.

Sadly, german uboats had prior art.

Later, I thought I had again done something special – use a vox switch to record when something could be heard, buffer the data, and just keep up a quiet little low bandwidth stream of encrypted data that could be turned back into speech… running all the time. If there was no data to decode, you just sent random data until something new popped up. It doesn’t take much to bury the signal into the background noise.

Sadly, and inevitably, there was french prior art, and it turned out to be a common technique of the ELF submarine crowd, including american subs.

Technology has moved on, and now there are serial interface low power ram chips far advanced over our little 8 MB storage. And 8 pin processors that can do a/d, d/a, compression and power management with time to spare.

“It’s so easy an arduino user could do it!”

If you want to see these techniques in action, complete with remote api built into the hardware, just look at any smart phone built after 2009.
It’s nothing short of amazing! :)

“Wanted: Wise-cracking overweight black detective with two weeks until retirement and overly attractive tattooed female crop-duster pilot.
Mission: Replace Fidel Castro with Dick Cheney’s half-cousin Raoul and turn Cuba into the west coast version of Kauai, but with better hotels and casinos.”

“Wanted: stock footage of a seaplane, three trained dobermans and several high mileage late model police cars with current collision insurance.”